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DP/DR vs Normal See Saw

2K views 11 replies 6 participants last post by  Charger 
#1 ·
I was thinking about how I could express my on going battle between the normal and dp/dr state and the analogy of a see saw came to mind.

On one seat we have our nemesis, dp/dr/anxiety-panic and the other side our elusive but comfortable sense of self. When the dp end of the see saw is bottomed out and the normal end is up in the air at it's highest point, this represents the feelings we have when we are our true self, grounded in reality, experiencing life as we should and have difficulty trying to imagine the dp/dr state. The polar opposite is when the dp/dr is at it's highest position but now we have feelings of abject terror/horror, no sense of self, no sense of reality, complete lack of control - existing at the lowest level of human functioning, simply put...hell.

Most of the time I feel that the see saw is level but constantly shifting ever so slightly up and down. With the level see saw it feels like your perception of self is split in two; you just can't determine if you?re mind is straight or dp'd and there's a lot of confusion. You carry on and the normal state starts to set in but as soon as you notice yourself self "being" the weight shifts and the dp/dr/fear floods your awareness. You try to ignore it, find something distracting to do, take your focus away from it and the weight slowly shifts to where the plank is level again but by no means steady. A couple of times a day you relax slightly and begin with the introspective thoughts but suddenly the weight shifts hard and the dp side of the plank rushes skyward and your quickly consumed with panic with no chance of stopping the rush of terror. Now you have to ride it through and your sure you'll never be sane again, everything normal seems millions of light years away but slowly the plank levels out and there is respite, but it's all relative as your back to where you started from, still feeling the pain but at least able to function.

At odd times the see saw momentarily lifts the normal self almost to the top of its arc and the experience of self and clarity takes you be surprise. You feel gasp of air pass your lips as shoulders drop and your body relaxes...how strange and wonderful it feels just to be normal, just like everyone else. But for some reason there is a sense of fear as if your not allowed to feel this way. Then the urge to cry comes, but you don't know why. Is it because you feel a sense of loss due to the time spent in the throes of dp or are they simply tears of joy. It doesn?t matter as you notice the see saw slowly descending and once again it's level.

I just want to know how I can place an un-shiftable 10 ton weight on the dp side of the see saw so that my awareness is constantly normal. I wish someone could give me an iron clad guarantee that I will never have to feel these sensations again. I'm just sick of this ride and I want off.
 
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#2 ·
Milan,

You cannot get rid of a burst appendix by thinking that you want to feel normal. Nor can you get rid of the symptom that something is very wrong by wanting to feel normal. If you don't address what is bothering you, you will get sicker and sicker and sicker.

Our emotions are expressed through our bodies. Your emotions are trying to tell you something about your body and your mind.

Discover what is REALLY bothering you and you will find relief. This is a psychosomatic illness. Your body is simply telling you that you are afraid of something.

If you choose to try to make the symptom (which is actually trying to save your life right now) disappear and do so temporarily through your will or through alcohol, like someone said they were doing, you are trying to cure a burst appendix by having a body massage. Now, THAT's insanity, no?

This is for everyone who is NOT in psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy:

Are you all in psychotherapy? What you need is to get at what's causing your stress to begin with. You will probably never remove the symptom if you don't deal with what your unconscious mind it trying to tell you.

The following is addressed only to those who are not in psychodynamic or psychoanalytical therapy:

If you're holding in feelings, if you're angry and someone and choose not to express it to them, if you're regretting something you did in the past, if you have old pain that you've repressed, feelings of negativity, and so forth, the next time they force your body to try to save you, you may, instead of DP/DR, get a rotten immune system, a heart attack, ulcers, or you may just snap straight into insanity.

Please don't yell at me for trying to scare you. I *am* trying to scare you. If you find a way to get rid of the symptom, which is ALL this is, you are going to suffer tremendously down the road with severe problems that will debilitate you.

So, I am begging you, if you're not in psychotherapy, get into it. Let the poison that is in you -- the source of the symptoms -- come out of you. If you don't, you will get sicker and sicker and sicker.

Listen to your body. Psychosomatic complaints are ALWAYS about what's bothering us.

Now if you're scared of doing inner work, don't be. The relief can be immediate -- and I mean IMMEDIATE. You'll be sitting there crying at your therapist's office (I agree with Janine that for this, the best psychotherapy is psychodynamic, not cognitive) and you'll be hating how you feel and how you hurt, but you will all of a sudden feel something happen. You will feel rejuvenated and free. Bit by bit, you deal with the hurts that you've buried (we all do it, so I mean the generic "you"). Even the very first time you dip into the pain, even if you cry just a little, you will feel some relief.

Unless you address the cause of the stress, you cannot possibly ever recover from DP/DR. You will get sicker and sicker, as I described above, with other maladies, some of which may in fact kill you.

This diatribe has been addressed to those of you who are NOT in psychodynamic or psychoanalytical therapy now. What you do NOT need is behavioral therapy, because that will not help you access the source of the problem.
 
#3 ·
I've had 7 years of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, my God, perhaps I'm not cured after all???

Sojourner ? really, I dig your passion but avoid the blanket statements please.

Its not so much the METHOD, its whether or not you click with a therapist and trust him or her enough to feel safe enough to completely spill your guts. The chosen school of thought is simply a framework.

Method is important, I agree, but "different things for different people." If CBT didn't work for you, fine, move on to something else.

In general, IF IT AIN'T WORKING, LOOK FOR SUMTHIN' ELSE!

CBT worked for me ? YIPEEDOODAA!

GOD BLESS US EVERYONE!
 
G
#4 ·
Discover what is REALLY bothering you and you will find relief. This is a psychosomatic illness. Your body is simply telling you that you are afraid of something.
While this is true to an extent, you have to realize that DP/DR is merely a symptom of many mental illnesses. As most of the people here have probably not been diagnosed (I've gone to the doctor who says a diagnosis to truly find out the problem will take a year or so to see how the brain develops, which I'm now cooperating with them for), there is a good chance that many of these symptoms are not uncurable by thought and expression. Yes, your mind or body may be trying to tell you something, but when chemicals get out of balance, they are not that easy to bring back in to order. And in numerous illnesses, such as psychosis or schizophrenia, the patient has to take medication for their brain to maintain the appropriate chemical levels. Although there may be an underlying fear in the development of most mental illnesses, they often don't know what causes them. Thus, no matter how much a schizophrenic or a person with depersonalization disorder talks about his "problems," this alone will likely not rid him of "the filth."
 
G
#5 ·
Milan,
I just wanted to say fabulous post, and I completely agree with your thoughts and opinions. It is so easy to say find what you are afraid of and deal with it but come on if it was that easy would we all be here day after day and night after night searching for the answer. Take care of yourself.
Katie
 
#6 ·
Well, WhereamI, I don't read about people being in therapy and exploring what's going on inside them. I don't read about people saying they're going to the doctor and demand that they be given something that will remove the awfulness. I don't believe my DP and panic and fear is any less severe than anyone else's. I endured one panic attack for four hours. I will never do that again. Of course I could not do therapy in that condition.

The symptoms have to be masked for you to do therapy. If you wait for them to go away on their own and just talk about them instead of using drugs to make you feel better, you will NEVER discover what's wrong inside.

So maybe my argument has been wrong all along. I should have advocated FIRST getting the proper medicine so the symptoms are masked and THEN getting therapy.

The symptoms of DP, panic, and anxiety are not there to just get your attention. They are there to force you to do something, not talk about the symptoms as if you could consciously control them. If we could do that, we wouldn't be on this board, and this board wouldn't even exist.

Someone who should know about this said recently that we live our lives using 100% "consciousness" broken down to 20% from our conscious mind and 80% from our unconscious mind.
 
#7 ·
Milan,

I liked your analogy of being on a seesaw. I have read all the helpful post so I will just say I hope you continue to do well in your search for that complete balance.

Had more to say, but decided to live in peace.

I agree with the post below mine. Excellent writing.

terri
 
#8 ·
Hey, I really think you are a creative writer... you seem to be able to put things into words and images really well. Some of the worlds best writers, artist, etc.... creative people were in constant pain... Think about writing for a living? Anyway.... I guess everyone has there own ideas, but i am seeing some progress without meds, using b complex, b6 and Flax seed. now I don't know if it is really the suplements or my wishful thinking, but even though I still have some symptoms they are somewhat better. I am also involved in therapy at The Sheppard Pratt institute in Baltimore and my therapist showed me that I tend to breath 16 breaths per min from my chest... hyperventallation is about 20 breaths per minute. he worked with me today on breathing from the diaphram and slower and it did clear my head and the way things looked. I think After todays session that we may have discovered a contributing factor to my DR . So anyway Meds aren't for everyone, some people do well on them, I have not. So I am also increasing excercising.. hitting the treadmill... I had a stress test yesterday and my doc cleared me for the excercise. Sometimes my symptoms get the better of me or change to new ones. BUt i do think I am making progress. I know there are certain advocates for drugs and chemical imbalances and all other sorts of unproven theories, some one mentioned being psychotic and / or schitz you need meds, well yeah, but not necessarily with Anxiety disorders, it is possible to recover without, When I was 19 I had panic attacks but recovered from them without anything, so it is possible... There are severe cases in which meds are used, but I think by in large DP/DR that is brought on from Anxiety can be beat naturally and with therepy. Maybe the natural road is longer, but I don't think we have Anxiety because we lack ZOLOFT or any other SSRI. If it is true that the chemistry is messed up then there are also natural ways to recover. Anway I digress... You write very well, you articulate the feeling very well, I wish you well,, and hey Consider writing a book......it would sell....

best wishes
KC
 
#9 ·
Thanks everyone for your kind responses.

No, never thought of writing but who knows maybe in the future I might become more interested. I find writing difficult, never quite able to express my thoughts clearly (especially with this disorder) and compared to the likes of Janine, Martin and many other bright people on this board I feel very inadequate. I keep pulling out the electronic dictionary to understand the words used in some posts.

Sojourner I have thought of doing some psychoanalytical type therapy in the hope that it might remedy any deep fears I have, but I will stick with my current psych for a few more months and see how things pan out. If I remain at the same point of recovery I'll try it. It seems that a lot of people who recovered did so using depth therapy so maybe there is something to it.
 
#11 ·
For whatever it may be worth, now that I'm drug-, DP-, and anxiety-free, I can recommend something, or rather report on what worked for me.

Change something you're doing now. I had a feeling I was on too high a dose of Zoloft, so my doctor and I reduced it. One day I realized that ANY Zoloft was obviously causing me to feel bad. It's now 15 days later and I'm still feeling that "normal" is up there in the breeze where it should be (using the see-saw analogy, which I really liked).

This was entirely too easy, though, so I am preparing myself for a possible return of depression after 6-8 weeks. If that happens, so be it. I'll try a different antidepressant. But I may have done more than remove the harmful chemical from my brain (Zoloft). In my therapy, I seem to be touching areas of my personality and feelings that I *thought* I had expressed before, but that apparently are doing something to change me deep inside.

I am a fairly impatient person; I cannot sit there and suffer panic attacks. I went from 150 mg of Zoloft to zero at one stroke, telling my doctor about it at the first opportunity I had, which was three days later.

Anyway, if you are on a steady dose of some medicine and still suffering the extreme ups and downs, work with your doctor to tweak your dose meaningfully or do something else that will have an effect on your brain and/or your feelings.

In my case, the anxiety was a sign that something was wrong. Looking back, it was not the best solution to have increased my Zoloft from 50 mg to 250 mg, but hey, my doctor is a super-qualified expert in psychopharmacology. But he was wrong. He's such a good doctor that he trusts his patients' hunches about their own conditions and totally supported me in my stopping the drug without his advice and without tapering off.

Perhaps if people would take a more active and collaborative stance with their doctors, they could develop their own hunches about what ails them, when the medicine is part of the problem, and when some other alternative should be tried.

Bottom line: If you have been in state X using dose Y for Z weeks and feel the same (awful), don't accept it and hope it changes. You already have your answer if you've let at least 2-3 weeks go by and still feel awful.

Change something -- anything -- that will have an impact on your brain's functioning.

The right brain "recipe" is there for each of us -- I firmly believe that. It may change over the course of our lifetimes, but it does exist. You felt fine once -- well, I still have my life issues and problems and sources of pain -- but the state of theoretical "well being" is STILL ACHIEVABLE. We all know this is true. So, FIND it -- find the recipe that your body needs. You can't satisfy your thirst until you reach out and pick up the glass of water and then pour it into your body so that your cells can use it. You can't satisfy your desire to feel "normal" until you change something in your body that allows you to feel "normal." Sitting and wishing for the glass of water to magically enter your body's cells will get you nowhere. You will dehydrate and you will die. Just so, sitting and wishing for your brain to create its own "normal" state just is not going to happen until you change something -- it's pure trial and error to find the recipe that will work, but you know it's there, right? I know it's there, but I couldn't have found it unless I changed something.

If your anxiety is not responding to medicine (and/or therapy) after a reasonable amount of time -- TIME has become your enemy. More TIME will NOT HEAL you. Change something.
 
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#12 ·
Sojourner that was well put. I am also recovered & found that the drug I was taking was doing me more harm then good. I was worried going off it would bring me back to a worse state but since Ihad improved immensely I figured I would just go off it & see what happens. I haven't looked back since. I only did this once I had stabilised though. Meaning I was still ill but I was about 80% of the way home & when I got off it I hit 100%. Like you say its all trial & error & if you do feel bad in 6-8 weeks time then you know you need meds & if you don't your are on the home run!
 
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